You gotta love a group with a review that starts “Uncle Bonsai are not normal.”

Normal it may not be, but fun it definitely is.

The Seattle-based trio was the darling of folk festivals and the concert circuit in the 1980s, performing their unique brand of rapid-fire zany-lyrics songs, with no subject off limits. Some of their crowd-pleasers were “Boys Want Sex in the Morning,” “Then God Made Malls” and “Womb for Rent.”

The group records on Yellow Tail Records, with most of the songs written by member Andrew Ratshin. He plays acoustic guitar and sings countertenor, while sopranos Arni Adler and Ashley O’Keefe accompany him for tight three-part harmonies.

The band members went their separate ways for a while, perhaps to recover from singing songs with so many words, but they are back together, and making their first appearance on Bainbridge Island in more than 17 years, playing 8 p.m. Nov. 18 at Island Center Hall in a concert billed as “The Return of Uncle Bonsai.”

Ratshin describes their songs as “frank vignettes of the beauty and misery of relationships, TV, hapless love, etc., sung with rapid-fire lyrics in exquisite (and often quite high) three-part throat-splitting harmonies.”

In 1998 the group reunited for the ambitious “Doug Suite,” 13 songs all about a less than stellar man named Doug, written by Ratshin. Uncle Bonsai performed the suite in its entirety at a concert in Seattle, prompting one reviewer to write, “It sounds like an unlikely premise for a concert, let alone a successful concert, let alone a great concert. But when Andrew Ratshin writes the songs, and Arni Adler, Ashley O’Keeffe, Patrice O’Neill, Libby Torrance and Ratshin sing them, suddenly you have the ingredients for the best concert in Seattle this year, and that’s just what took place . . .”

Another reviewer wrote of the group, “Their performance is uncontrolled fireworks and improvisational pyrotechnics. I’ve seldom had the pleasure of seeing and hearing an act that has so completely caught my interest.”

For all the praise shoveled in their direction, the group doesn’t take itself all that seriously. Part of the press kit assembled by Ratshin includes a full page “The Beatles vs. Uncle Bonsai: An Honest Comparison by Andrew Ratshin of Uncle Bonsai.”

For example, there are 10 letters in both names, both did songs about body parts and both recorded songs with seafood motifs. Some similarities are more of a stretch: The Beatles grew up in Liverpool, Ashley grew up in Riverside. The Beatles sang “Fool On The Hill,” Uncle Bonsai sings “Doug At His Mom’s.” But the eeriest similarity, Paul McCartney is a left handed vegetarian, Ashley is a left handed vegetarian. What are the odds?

Ratshin concludes his comparison, “If you disregard the fact that Uncle Bonsai is a Seattle-based trio, featuring two women and myself, doing original songs, singing three-part harmonies, backed by a single acoustic guitar, and still together after all these years — and that the Beattles were four British guys — the similarities between these two groups is staggering.”

Ratshin said that fans of the Beatles should come to Island Center Hall for the concert.

“We won’t be doing any of their songs but we’ll probably be done by 10.”

Uncle Bonsai plays 8 p.m. Nov. 18 at Island Center Hall, 8395 Fletcher Bay Rd., Bainbridge Island.

Tickets are $17 advance, available at Glass Onion and Vern’s Winslow Drug in Winslow and online at www.unclebonsai.com. Tickets at the door are $20. wu